Motley Kamuka

With Kant's 300th birthday coming up on April 22nd, I'm seeing a lot of "why study philosophy articles", and frankly I find offensive to even take that tack. To me it's not in question and I'd argue 99% of our misguidedness comes from lack of philosophical vision, why we're in a climate crisis, why there's so much othering, prejudice and oppression.  I went to look for the examples I've seen recently and wow, there's a lot of articles that say "philosophy" in the title on the internet, I take it back, hardly a trend if I've seen two of them that I can't find now. They still don't know how consciousness works. And then Daniel Dennett died. I read Darwin's Dangerous Idea , and went to work and asked if people were evolutionists or creationist. At the time I worked at a special education school. The book made it clear to me that you couldn't be both, that evolution erases the creation narrative of Christianity that...

I did a year abroad and studied at the University of Warwick 1988/9. One of the greatest years of my life, mostly because of rowing with my excellent friends, Rune, Guy and Paul, and finding my first wife on a trip to Russia. But that's another story.  The philosophy department at Warwick was pretty impressive when I was there. Susan Haack was there. A disciple of  Karl Popper, David Miller was there. But the head of the department was Roger Trigg . At the time, I thought his book Reality at Risk was a bit pedant, but it seems quite necessary now. The idea doesn't seem too radical--that we need an anchor, or nothing is wrong or right. So many ideas can drift into subjectivism. I remember  I cleaved towards subjectivism by becoming a psychoanalyst, for a time, the reality we believe can have more impact on what we do than reality. But I've always been a metaphysical realist. Sort of like GE Moore's common sense realism, though I could be attracted to Platonic realism ...